Lost in Translation (Bruce Cockburn)

Dau yishyeh sta atyaun errdautau 'ndi Yisus

avwa tateh dn-deh Tishyaun stanshi teya wennyau
aha yaunna torrehntehn yataun katsyaun skehnn
Iesus Ahattonnia, Ahattonnia, Iesus Ahattonnia

As they entered and saw Jesus they praised his name,
They oiled his scalp many times, anointing his head
with the oil of the sunflower
                                                                                                              Jesus, he is born

There's a magic to each language, a special way of talking about and describing the world that can't quite translate into the framework of another tongue. We forget that this is true of the Bible as well, and so when we read the Bible in translation we miss some of the depth of meaning and texture of the original. 

The Huron Carol was originally written in Wyandot (also called Wendat) the language of the Wyandot/Huron people of the Ontario region of North America. The carol was a French missionary's way of communicating the message of Christ in terms more familiar to the context of the Wyandot people.

It speaks of Christ who has come to ransom humanity from bad spirits, and the "sky people," (whom we call angels and the Biblical Greek called "messengers") who are here to ask us to rejoice -- literally in Wyandot, to "be on top of life."

It's both sad and interesting, therefore, that this carol got turned into a sentimental hymn about imagining Christ if he were born as an Indigenous American. There's nothing wrong with imagining Christ as being born among other peoples, or honoring the specific ways in which each nation imagines Christ to be "one of us." What doesn't work is when we do this imagining on our terms, in our cultural language instead of trying to understand another's.

So sometimes it's better to dwell in the mystery of words that are foreign to our tongues, terms and ideas that don't quite make sense in translation, and recognize that it is precisely in these places of static and imperfect understanding where the true beauty and mystery of our experience of the incarnation lies.




Jesus Ahatonnia (The Huron Carol from Bruce Cockburn on Myspace.



The incarnation is, in the end, deeply cultural and deeply personal. If we truly believe Christ came for all of us, then there will be ways in which the mystery of the incarnation becomes embedded in another culture that don't make sense to us. ... or, that illuminate our own understanding of the incarnation in a way we'd never come to on our own.

In the common English translation of this carol, God is referred to as Gitchie Manitou, which is actually an Ojibway term meaning, roughly, Great Spirit. Yet the word 'manitou' isn't so easy to describe as simply, "spirit." The "character" of the word manitou is itself changeable meaning sometimes talent... attribute... spirit... potential... potency... substance... essence... mystery.

Even if in the wrong language, I like that embedded in the awkward English translation of this hymn is a word that calls us back to unknowing: the mystery of Christ, the potency he carried even into his birth, the spirit and attributes he embodied even as a young person and into adulthood.  These are the core mysteries of the incarnation, and whether they dwell with us through the medium of another tongue or our own, they offer themselves to our wonder, our reverence, and our great joy in a God who knows no boundaries of language or culture for the Incarnation speaks the native tongue of each and all in slightly different ways.

May you experience the awe of the God Who Comes in a language and culture you know as the same God Who Comes to others in ways that sometimes remain unintelligible... and yet offer the blessing of unknowing, of an experience of God outside language where the heart must guide us Home.

                                                                                              - Anna

An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.  

- Luke 2: 9-12

Too Much To Believe (The New Pornographers)

Joseph really doesn't get a lot of airtime in the Christmas story, or in Christmas music in general. So I love the depiction of Joseph in today's song as a worried, harried, slightly outcast partner, trying to decide if he can "be cool" with this whole Son-of-God Born-of-a-Virgin 'Christmas' thing. 

We know from Matthew's gospel that Joseph has a change of heart about his role with Mary (and therefore Jesus) after being visited by the Angel Gabriel in a dream, but I imagine this song taking place in the time before that strange dream, as Joseph wandered the streets, brooding, wondering what would become of his life plans. The song illustrates his thoughts like this: 

I know this child was sent here

to heal our broken time

and some things are bigger than we know

You're asking me to believe too many things

You're asking me to believe too many things...

Joseph Who Understood by The New Pornographers - Lyrics HERE.

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God.

How vast is the sum of them!

I try to count them -- they outnumber the grains of sand;

I come to the end -- I am still with you.

- Psalm 139: 17-18

One of the ways we often find ourselves holding the mystery as Advent draws us toward Christmas is when our intellectual doubts and our need for control rub up against the incomprehensibility of God. We find ourselves trying to believe too many things: that God became fully human in Christ; that this Jesus has something to do with us today; that God has not abandoned the world; that God cares at all about our puny, messy lives; that Christ will come again to reconcile and make new... it's all very heady stuff.

Luckily, believing isn't just about our minds. The root of the word 'believe' means "to give one's heart to." In the end, we are faced with one simple question: can we give our heart to this story of God Incarnate, of a mewling baby who will become the messiah of an upside-down kingdom of grace?

This is no small question. To give our hearts to this story asks something of us: we are called to wrestle a blessing from it, just as Joseph struggles in this song to wrestle a blessing from his strange circumstances. In the song he symbolizes more than just the Biblical character, but many doubting partners, many doubting hearts, asking, "Mary, is he mine?"

Is this small Christ, this someday-revolutionary, mine? Ours?  Not ours to own, but to cherish and wrestle with, to question and ponder, to hold in wonder and awe.  

What does your heart say as you venture deeper into the Christmas story?

May you find your heart captivated by a story to which you can give your heart anew each day, with awe and curiosity, creativity and hope.

                                                                                                 - Anna

Hold the Mystery

Some days the words just will not come. They are dried up under our scorching sadness, they are snatched away by the shock of tragedy, disjointed by the world in which we feel like strangers, or simply fatigued by deep lamenting through the dark night. Some days our words are just not sufficient, a paltry vocabulary to try and name the vast Mysteries.

This weekend the sadness of many precious lives lost, overwhelmed me. The responses of tongues wagging and fingers pointing (including my own) exhausted me. The anger over our collective unwillingness to build peace, burned through me. And now I have nothing left, no words, only sadness and fatigue and the ever-encroaching desire to forget, to simplify, to move on.

This week AMP will look at ways in which we Hold the Mystery. A theme originally chosen (at least for my part) with an eye toward the Divine mysteries of the season, the wonder, the amazement, the parts of our story that are just beyond us.  But, today, in light of the tragic events of this weekend, I must confess that I am having trouble accessing that kind of mystery.

That sense of benevolent mystery, that other-worldly peace of the starry darkness, the wonder of God incarnate in a baby: those are not what I am feeling today.  I find, instead, that I am stuck on more immediate mysteries. There is so much about this world that I do not understand: suffering and apathy, brokenness, violence and our human need to hold on to these things so tightly, cutting ourselves every which way but loose from their grasp on us.

We cannot escape the realization that part of the mystery of this season is painful. Because between the evening news and the candlelight Christmas Eve service, between the reality of the world and the hope of God making the world new, there is a crushing sense that things should not, and cannot, be this way.  Between these counter points there is a void, a space where we cannot fully understand, cannot even fully name our dual reality; a space of sighs, it empties us, again and again, as we wait there for the advent of our hope realized.

There are moments in this space where the mystery, the un-knowing, the incomprehensibility are greater than our words, there are moments in which music and melodies move us powerfully, as words cannot; and moments beyond even our musical expression, moments in which all we may do is fall silent.

And so we do fall silent today. I chose today’s video because there is no sound. I invite you to give yourself to the silence for a few moments today, trusting it to help us hold the mysteries. May we find something solid about silence, something stable, restful. May it be a place of realigning ourselves, a place where that which is within us may rise to the surface and find release. May the silence lead us to dwell with the heavy questions, the deep despair, the neediness of creation; even as we dwell with the mysteries of Advent, of God moving in creation, breathing in the deep silences, slowly, steadily, in time with our heartbeat, as together we wait.

                                                      Checkout more wind maps here

Thou, who breathed in the womb

who dwelt in the tomb

mercy, have mercy

on us who wait.*

-Lindsey

*prayer by Jan Richardson

Q & A (Raphael Saadiq)




photo courtesy David Pham

"Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you."  Matthew 7:7

We need good questions. Questions that help us name our needs and desires, questions that elicit our voice and create space for us to know ourselves better, questions that identify the dissonance and brokenness in life, questions that open us up to dream of something different.

In his book, Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes to a young man who is troubled by questions to which he cannot find the answers. Rilke says. “Love the questions themselves; as if they are locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language…live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live you way into the answers.”

In this Advent season one of our needs is time and space to question, and to sit with the questions; to be, to wait, to speak and to listen. There is some grace here, some breathing room to pause, some relief to be had in calling out the disjointed places in this season and in our lives.

                                     

Our song today reminds us, however, that we cannot stop there. As much as we need the space and the practice of questioning, we also need answers. We cannot stop pursuing, hoping for, demanding answers to some of our most important questions.  The catch of Advent is that we tell the truth, and name our needs and ask our questions and we wait and we dwell and we observe; but we do so with expectation, with hope - we need to.

 So we look for answers. We expect answers for questions like Saadiq’s, who will “help that child whose only 4 years old?” We demand answers when we confront injustices in our communities and brokenness in our institutions. We work toward answers for questions that echo across the nations, “How can peace become a reality on our streets and in our world?” And we hope for answers to the questions whispering within us: “Can I be transformed?”

So we come, needy, to this Advent season. We bring the questions that we must ask and the answers that we already have, in the hope that they will talk to each other, sparking among us better questions and deeper answers, for these, we need in every season.

As we enter this Advent season, may we hear, in community, the voices around us and the voice within. May we listen for the deepening questions, and seek together the strength to press on for their answers.

                                                                                                                                              -Lindsey

Fri Jan. 6 - Window on the Mystery (1 Giant Leap)

I have other sheep that are not of this sheep pen.  I must bring them also.  They, too, will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.  
              - John 10:16


On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him.  Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they returned home by another road.
         - Matthew 1:11-12

The shepherds get a lot of air time as being God's unexpected chosen guests at the manger - not powerful kings but the poorest of the poor, called upon to receive the Son of God. But what do we make of those other first guests, mysterious foreigners of other faiths who journeyed afar? Not Mary's 'church family' or religious leaders from Joseph's synagogue, but wisdom seekers, star trackers, faith sojourners?

The fact is, those "Wise Men," don't seem to have become 'Christians' in any recognizable sense either before or after they visited the manger - yet they still came to witness, honor, and give gifts to Jesus where he lay.  They were Zoroastrian foreigners who sensed the in-breaking of God in Jesus and worshiped that divinity, ultimately leaving transformed.  So in a way, this shows that Jesus truly and fully embodied the Divine Mystery which lays at the heart of all religions.  Yet rather than making Christ the center, the period on that Mystery, it also makes Christ the window on the Mystery itself.

As we've explored, that first Christmas was full of surprises and reversals, turning people's expectations upside-down. This Epiphany, we might consider the surprising ways in which Christ's coming continues to upend us, razing the boundaries we had in place, upsetting our rules and expectations.  Over and over, what Christmas really show us is that the God we worship is unlimited by our current understandings of the way the world works - and in the story of the "Wise Men" cannot even be tamed by the boundaries of religions we have tried to erect, transforming both us and others in the process.

I Love the Way you Dream by 1 Giant Leap feat. Asha Bohsle, Michael Stipe, et al.  (lyrics HERE)

Note: Brief nudity in the context of religious ritual toward the end of the video.

As we journey forward from Christmastide into the early days of a new year, may we feel Christ's in-dwelling Spirit making all things new, not just in the world, but in our own vision of the world - of its peoples; of its complicated, messy, problematic, blessing-filled faith traditions; and of God's spiraling, upending, all-encompassing plan for us all.

Thanks for journeying with us- and peace in the coming year!

Its been real, its been fun, its been real fun.

-Lindsey and Anna

Sat Dec. 24 - Things Hold Together (Dave Matthews Band)

Joseph went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.              -Luke 2:5-7

(Anna) Maybe this isn't the most reverent thing to say on Christmas Eve, but babies often remind me of Cracker Jack boxes. They may not all look the same, but there's really no telling what they'll become. Reprobate, saint, mediocre wishy-washer... they all just start out as, well, babies - complete with personalities but not yet shaped by the marks of fate upon their skin. So pause the manger scene for a minute and flash forward thirty or so years: what do we see now? Does it even really matter on Christmas night?

Yes, it matters, because if I can't get it in my head that I'm welcoming a child who isn't just going to sit quietly in a crib forever, but will one day be the pushy, annoying, rabble-rouser that doesn't just implicate people I don't like but who pushes back on me as well, well then I might as well just open my gifts and be done with it. But, if even for a fleeting moment, I can hold on to the fact that there is both something real and pure about the lavish gift of love and peace offered in that silent night in the manger, AND that there is something complicated, messy and uncomfortable about this baby's birth that will (and already had) upset the order of the world -- then I've truly held Christmas in my hands. When it feels almost impossible to hold this paradox in mind, I just remember that the almost-impossible and the nearly-incredible are what lie at the heart of the Christian faith - as this night where God who comes as a human and showers us with 'love, love, love.. all around' so wonderfully proves.

(Lindsey) Every good story has a conflict. Great works of literature, Disney movies, the good story of a friend, they all have something with which the main character must contend: bad guys, hardship, or even her/himself. But this story, this baby, brings our literary preferences pretty close to home. It flips the script. Jesus (as baby, man, God)  is the conflict, the scandal, the sticking point upon which the world's way of being trips and topples - and is the conflict over which we still trip and tumble and are upended.

The story of this night unfolds into the life of Christ - among a long list of characters: 'less-informed authorities,' cynics, jeering neighbors, demanding family members, those who seek violence as a means to peace, people who love their traditions more than anything, and those who will not risk. I have at times inhabited many of those characters in the stories of my own life. But this story is not (only) a great literary work, a moralistic tale, or the story of a friend - this story is more. It is an axis of wonder, a place that we return to year after year, a mysterious truth that we spin round and round. The wonder of it is this: that the conflict and chaos, the resolution, the love, the frailty and the fear are all present as God's grace embraces the world. That in spite of (or, I believe, because of) this complexity, both present in the world and present in us, the Creator came to walk among these 'characters' -- and comes still to walk with us now: the uninformed, the violent, the cynical, the fearful.

And so we fall silent on this Christmas Eve in the face of a love that is bigger than we understand. And we dwell for a moment in the wonder that God, in whom all things hold together, became a small baby and reached out to embrace all things in the hold of grace.


May we be embraced by wonder as Grace is born again to us tonight.

                           - Anna and Lindsey

Wed Dec. 21 - Coming Home (Alexi Murdoch)

For I am convinced that neither life nor death,
neither angels nor demons,
neither the present nor the future,
nor any powers,
neither height nor depth,
nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

                 - Romans 8:38-39



Sometimes less words are better; in the case of talking about dwelling in to God's love made manifest at Christmas, maybe too many words just flatten the mystery.  So just a handful:

It's possible that Alexi Murdoch's Orange Sky is a song about romantic love or love for a parent, but the language is almost confessional in tone -- 'in your love, my salvation lies, in your love.'  No matter the subject, this is not an individualistic, self-interested love - but rather a love that wraps into an entire system, a community.  It is salvation that includes the brother and sister standing by, that allows the speaker to find hope and strength and recognize a home place.

Alexi Murdoch, Home

It's 'a long road we've been walking on,' and sometimes it's easier to let our 'strong minds' carry on in the belief that we are alone, that our broken hearts are fractured too completely... but we know better.

Here is what I know now:

The Love that comes at Christmas comes something like in this song, both intensely personal and yet wholly communal.  The love of Christ's birth isn't inward-facing, but saves us to be with others and the world.  This love saves us not just by some feat of "substitutionary atonement" or sacrificial suffering, but also simply by being what it is: the love of God made so real and immediate that it needed to take on flesh in order to look us truly and fully in the eyes.  

This is what I know now: we are loved beyond our imaging, beyond height and depth and all powers, and that this is love that has power and force to free and save us - even from ourselves.  In this end, this love is where I live; this love is my home that doesn't save me or take me from the earth, but roots me more fully in the here and the now of things, alongside my sisters and brothers, creatively, openly, communally loving and being loved into the world that is sill being born this season.

May we dwell in the knowledge that our salvation lies in the love God which is so elemental, so radical, that it became human and dwelt among us.

                      - Anna

Sat Dec. 17 The Hour of Unknowing (Red Mountain Music)

"Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries." 

 -1 Corinthians 4:1

        


     There is a lot that I don’t know; more that I don’t understand. I’m not even counting the day I was absent from biology when they covered the Mendelian Square. Although, perhaps it was my years of somewhat mediocre scholarship that accustomed me to living in a space of unknowing. On a wider scale, in our modern American culture we don’t really like not having things figured out.  There is a way in which we seek to and, in large part, can control our environments by figuring out systems, workings, cause and effect; sometimes. The only problem is that God can not be controlled by us, or figured out, or systematized.  God is full of mystery.

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers,
wearing
their colored clothes; caps and bells.

And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at tall,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

-Denise Levertov, Primary Wonder

                                                   Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

          I usually only hear today’s song sung at Christmas Eve church services. So when I hear it images of people gathered late at night in candlelight come to my mind and it reminds me of a moment during this season that I love. It is an hour when unknowing reigns, when we are ok with giving ourselves over to the mystery, surrender to wonder; when we remember that our faith story tells about a Deity that inexplicably came into the world as a baby and dwells among us still in ways of love and welcome that confound us, sometimes to the point of silence.  And perhaps that is the way that we learn to live with mystery, to keep silence and embrace the moments when the Great Mystery surrounds and embraces us.

Teach us to dwell in you, Divine Mystery.